Cheese and Potato Knishes Made With Bisquick

Posted on Nov.23,2010

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I tried to make knishes. Potato and cheese filled knishes, if I remember correctly (a true comfort food if there ever was one). Now, my dough skills aren’t quite at the point I’d even call a “skill”. It’s more like I have dough unskills. And with that first set of knishes I did, you could tell by by each knish’s dough thickness as to whether it was made early or later in the batch. By the time I finished with them, I’d finally gotten the dough to wrap nice and thin around each potatoey pile, but the earlier ones were thick and bready indeed.

Fast forward to recently, when Drew needed to make something for his culture-themed work potluck. His group was doing Germany, and the slackers in his group had already volunteered to bring in the sausages. He thusly ended up deciding on knishes, having fond memory of the knishes of yore (Shh! They’re actually Ukranian/Jewish, not German!). I volunteered to help make them, apparently lacking in memory of the pain-in-the-assness of making the knishes of yore. Incidentally, “Knishes of Yore” would make an excellent band name.

Realizing the work that lay ahead, I did a desperate internet search for easy knishes, and lo and behold, discovered the most brilliant idea ever: knishes made with Bisquick. Yum! As Drew’s boss has Celiac’s, we also decided to plunge into new realms, getting some gluten-free biscuit mix to attempt gluten free knishes.

First, I boiled the potatoes:

Potatoes are truly the Starch of the Gods. Well, the Starch of the Cheap Gods, in any case. I love that I can buy 10 lbs of these babies for $2.00. If only I could live on potatoes!

Incidentally, my recipe method for this was along the lines of “look at a few knish recipes, then make something up.” It’s really the most entertaining method of cooking, even if the results aren’t quite as accurate as one might like.

Next, I fried up some onions with a giant glob of butter. Nothing like a big blob of fat plus bad breath!

After the onions were properly flaccified, I mixed in the potatoes, along with green onions, a generous helping of sour cream, oregano, basil, salt, pepper, plus feta. Feta cheese is so good, I wish I could just buy a goat that would follow me around and squirt out feta at random. It would be glorious. On a related note, I could also have a bunch of plants follow me around and randomly commit suicide to donate Greek salads for the feta to go on. A bouncing salami would be awfully nice, too. Oh, what a posse that would be!

Yeah, these guys were a bit sloppy. I mixed up the Bisquick using some milk plus a little oil, and the oil did very little to make the dough not stick to my fingers. Pretty much had to constantly dip my fingers into water, it was quite the moist experience.

As for the gluten-free bisquick dough? Yeah…I had to add a lot of milk, and a great deal of oil, and a bit of egg as well just to make it vaguely not crumbly. And it still didn’t really want to act like dough. I eventually convinced it to at least act like Play-doh. So I quickly stuffed the gluten-free dough full of filling before it realized that I was lying to it and that no, it would not be shaped into dinosaurs by four year olds (which is every pile of dough’s fantasy, deep down inside).

So I brushed some egg atop all of these proto-knishes, and let them bake for about 15 minutes or so.

They were tasty! And cute, for that matter. I tried a gluten-free one, and they were not so tasty as the chock-full-of-gluten ones, but Drew’s boss greatly enjoyed them! A caveat on these knishes – I found them enjoyable because they tasted like Bisquick. I don’t think they were quite as tasty as the ones I made before with home-made dough, however. No delicate dough here, these things were super thick and bready. Nonetheless, this is a very useful solution if you are the proud owner of generous quantities of both Bisquick and potatoes, and are desperately fiending for a way to combine the two in a glorious and adorable unity of starch.

2 Comments

GuestApril 11, 2014 12:28 pm

oh thank you for this

JimmiJanuary 13, 2017 7:49 am

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